


Something to Keep Him Here

by sheffiesharpe



Series: Peace Arc AU [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen, Peace Arc AU, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-30
Updated: 2011-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-20 21:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheffiesharpe/pseuds/sheffiesharpe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabranth in Archades, after Raminas's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something to Keep Him Here

**Author's Note:**

> Follows All That They Can See. Prequel to Making His Peace With It.

The days fall away like so many dead leaves. When his probationary period as Magister ends, there will be some manner of fete, but now there is no fanfare, and he is grateful. Gabranth adjusts to his new duties easily, automatically—they are not so different than what he has done before, and they are not harder than the things he has done most recently. He learns that the truth of what happened at Nalbina is known to very, very few, and he learns, though he is not yet supposed to know, that he was right; his brother lives, and he is being kept in Nalbina, behind magicks Gabranth cannot hope to break. Yet. That word buoys him, somehow, and some days, he does not know what he would do if he were faced with his twin again. Some days, he hates Basch, so fathomlessly and fully he can barely curb his rage. Some days, his hate turns inward, and he cannot face a mirror, cannot hold steel alone because he doesn’t know what he’d do. Some days, too, when his duties for the day are over, he must lock himself in his quarters before that anger turns outward, toward the nation he serves now.

Even at the beginning, when his service to Archades was digging culverts in Tchita, then a common infantryman, it didn’t feel like this, as though the city walls were closing in around him. Then, too, there seemed to be a way up and out of those days; his advancement was fast, his commanding officer ready to reward initiative. But Zecht is gone now, and they had not been close, not in the last two years, not when Zecht said Gabranth had learned all he had to teach. When Zecht, too, had changed, when the shadows under his eyes grew thick and purple, when he had spent long hours closeted in Draklor. Then there was Nabudis.

Gabranth hangs his armor, the stand making it look as though he is still within the metal shell. He had thought that the helm would make him feel claustrophobic, but that alone has freed him—no one can see his expressions, where his gaze truly lands. Would that he could wear that when he is not on-duty, but he cannot. He is not even supposed to wear his uniform if he leaves the palace complex, so that whatever habits he has in his free time are not overtly connected to his position.

His habits. His black leather chest waits at the foot of the bed, and he has only to send for Mathias if he wishes to indulge one of them. He lifts the lid, strokes the supple tails of his floggers, and he closes it again. He has no mood for pleasure or company, and if he can barely control his own passions, he has no right to control anyone else’s.

The window, though, shows a fine, clear night, crisp, and there are no clouds over Tchita. He dresses to hunt and shoulders his bow, and Tristan scents him as he enters the stable, calling until the whole of it echoes with chocobo noise. He buries his hands in the bird’s thick feathers, and Tristan worries his fingers with beak and tongue, picks at the shine of his cloakpin. It’s been too long since he’s been here, and he spends the better part of an hour brushing the stable-dust from his feathers. Tristan spends the time pulling the trim from the edge of his cloak and pecking his shoulder when he goes too long without scratching his crest. He’ll have a bruise from it, but it’s not unpleasant, the bird’s simple needs, the repetition of motion.

He leads Tristan out of the city, feeling slightly less burdened as the streets empty, and when the highlands open wide ahead of him, his lungs expand. He mounts, and Tristan churns up chunks of turf as he tears across the plains. Wyrdhares scatter in front of them, and later, when Tristan has had a good, long run, he’ll think of getting them dinner. But for now, they will run. He bends lower over Tristan’s neck, and they skim the earth towards the west, toward the setting sun. Archades dips behind the hills, and there is a small copse of trees ahead. It is no forest, not what he remembers, but on nights like this, when the air is turning crisp and the city lights are far enough away to see stars pulling themselves from the east’s dark edge—some of the weight lifts. So long as he faces west.

And so he does. The coeurls yowl, but they do not hunt in packs, and one cat would not risk a try against a grown bull chocobo. The lizards and malboros are quieted by the night’s chill, and he thinks that they could ride forever. The wilderness deepens, turns feral as the Highlands climb, and if he would go far enough—for days, at this pace—he would find the broken stone that had marked the border. From there, the steppes rise to snow-capped mountains, and he leans forward as Tristan’s stride stretches still longer.

Then Tristan pulls up short, warks loud. Another chocobo—juvenile, by its frantic cheep—answers from the lee of a rock. There aren’t wild chocobos in the wilderness around Archades anymore, all bred or culled before he’d come there, and Tristan hisses at something else that is hissing. It is not the bird.

It _is_ a couerl, a large one, and its whiskers spark as it paces. Beside the bird, a small Hume, or something shaped like a Hume, but it is cloaked and the light is fading fast. Gabranth bends his bow and shoots from Tristan’s back, but the couerl is already turning to teleport when the arrow strikes it. The hit is poor, in its flank, and the cat screams, but it doesn’t fade, can’t reappear behind him now. But now it is more dangerous than when it was simply thinking to take a meal, and the cloaked figure thrusts at the cat’s shoulder with a rapier. The couerl whirls and bats it away; the sound the sword makes when it clatters against the rock marks it a light practice blade, and the figure—the child—falls back, cries out.

Gabranth looses another arrow that strikes the cat’s forepaw, then charges the couerl. If he and Tristan can turn it away from the child, come between the predator and prey, that will be well, but the young chocobo mantles and calls, and the couerl is undeterred, protected, it knows, on the far side by the rock. The child is trying to climb, and there is no way for Tristan to shoulder the cat aside without colliding with the rock.

Gabranth gathers himself as Tristan dashes, checks the dagger at his belt. The trick is old, learned a lifetime ago, but gods willing, it may serve. He dives and rolls as he hits the ground. It nearly takes the breath from him and a rock hidden in the grass will leave a bruise, but these are the least of his worries. The couerl isn’t startled, doesn’t back up, and he has no chance to get to his feet when it leaps, changing its target to him.

“Run,” he manages to cough out. There’s no time to see if the child does. The couerl is on him, its back claws raking his shins. The thick wool of his cloak snares the cat’s foreclaws, but he cannot stay under it. Even if he kills it now, its death throes, if he is not quick enough, could gut him. He wears no armor, only the dark homespun and leather that covers hunters of all countries.

He shoves, shoves hard, and rolls, cuts backhanded at the couerl’s eyes. The strike isn’t true, but one of its antennae falls, and the beast screams again, rends the wool. The cloak itself pulls tight at his throat. He struggles with the clasp, yanks the pin free, and before the cloth falls, the cat springs again. This time, the dagger bites deep into its throat. The purple-dark blood sprays, acrid on his lips, and he barely avoids the couerl’s body as it falls, the clutching spasms of its claws.

He breathes. His trousers are shredded from the knees down, and his own blood, as dark as the cat’s in the near-dark, stripes his legs. He steps, winces, looks for Tristan. The chocobo stands beside the smaller one, his feathers puffed and his crest still flared. The child is between them, and the rapier is in—his, Gabranth thinks—hands again.

“Are you all right?” The boy’s pale face turns right and left, looking for more danger. That’s wise enough, and the boy has enough wits to speak.

Gabranth nods. Something about the voice is familiar, but he can’t place it. He steps slowly toward them, clucks his tongue for Tristan, and Tristan crowds close quickly, still hissing at the blood-scent, but he calms when Gabranth puts one arm over his back, uses him as a crutch.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone. Tell me where, and I will take you back to your family.” The back of his mind says the boy might not have any. Were someone to offer the same to Gabranth, what could he say? _Guide me to a circle of cold stone at the foot of the Ronsenberg. Lead me into a dungeon’s bowels._  

The boy doesn’t answer that. He pulls something from a pouch, and suddenly there is clean white light, a high-quality crystal in the boy’s palm.

“You’re hurt,” the boy says, and he digs in his pouches again, but the hood and cloak he wears are too large, falling over his eyes and his hands.

“It’s nothing.” The scratches are deep, but nothing is truly damaged. He has ridden longer with worse. He looks up. There is no mistaking him in the light. “Milord Larsa.” The youngest son of Emperor Gramis stands before him, nearly eaten by a Tchita _raksas_.

Here the boy looks up, his eyes wide. “Are—are we acquainted?” He covers the startle by pouring a potion over Gabranth’s shins, but Gabranth sees that he clutches the rapier tight in his left hand. Someone will need to teach him to keep his weapon in his strong hand, to do other tasks with the weaker, so that he would not be as vulnerable in cases like these. Drace would have taught him that already, though she has said that Vayne has care of Larsa’s martial training.

And Gabranth forgets himself. No, they are not acquainted, not as he looks now, his hair shorn short and his face bare. He wipes the blood from his face as best he can with his shirt-sleeve, and he goes to one knee, to show respect and not to tower over the child. Tomorrow, he will be sore. “Gabranth, milord. My quarters are beside Judge Magister Drace’s.” It has been some time since he’s seen the boy. When he was small, very small, he knew him better. But since Vayne reached his majority, Larsa has been somewhat secreted.

Larsa peers closer at him, holds the crystal close. “You’ve changed,” he says. And he looks hard at Gabranth’s eyes. He is not speaking of the change to his hair. “And you’re a Magister yourself now. Curious that you should be here at such an hour.” His eyes flicker toward the side, toward Archades, and also deeper into the Highlands. He looks troubled.

Gabranth would laugh, were it not for the harried look on the boy’s face. A lad of ten shouldn’t have the ability to look so. “Should I not ask the same thing of you, prince.” He reaches out to the young chocobo, smoothes her cheekfeathers. She’s as young as the boy, relatively speaking, still a year shy of being rideable, even for someone as slight as Larsa.

Larsa clears his throat, raises his chin. “My brother Vayne is to be made consul in Dalmasca. I am going to ascertain…the…place.” Here he looks to the side. “For no one will tell me aught about it. They say it is a desert. I _know_ it is a desert. What is it _like_.” It seems he barely resists stamping his foot, but he looks at Gabranth. “You have been there.”

He will not ask how Larsa knows that. He can only nod. There is no sense in giving him a lie. But he will not volunteer anything, not tonight. “I know, milord, that you will not get there riding in this direction. Nor could you arrive there in one piece with only this pretty one for company.” The chocobo butts up under his hand while he scratches.

Larsa ferrets out a map. He looks at it under the crystal’s light, looks around. The sky is dark, and Gabranth only knows east from west by familiarity and by the stars, because the Highlands stretch out wide, featureless unless one looks closely. “Which way was I going?”

“On a course only to be terribly lost.” The stars of the Reclining Stag point north and west, and to go this way follows the line of its neck, its antlers. “And then on to the mountains.”

Larsa sits on the dewing grass. “To Landis. Where you are from. Is that where you were going?”

He looks down because he cannot look toward that place, nor can he look at the sky it shared with Archades, and nor can he look east, where Basch is, somewhere still. “Landis is no longer. There is nowhere there to go.” It’s not true. There are villages still, and people in them, but it is noplace to him. It cannot be. “I was only riding with my friend here. It is a fine night.” Tristan is worrying beakfuls of meat from the couerl’s corpse, and here, above the city, it’s cool enough that his breath fogs. He slides his hands through the grass, lets the breeze chill his skin.

Larsa pulls his own cloak closer about him. He puts his map away and regards Gabranth seriously. “Would you keep my secret? Tell no one you found me here?” He does not need to say that he’d never be left out of sight again if anyone knew the prince was nearly eaten. The tethers on the boy—who is still a boy, even if he is an emperor’s son—are already short enough.

Gabranth nods. “If you will not travel alone so, milord.” He thinks of who else might have discovered the prince. “The dangers of this world are not only beasts.” Larsa knows that, certainly, but he feels compelled to say it.

“You have my word. I shall only go with those I trust as friends.” He puts his chin on his drawn up knees, and he is so small like that, for all the poise he has for someone so young. He tucks his hands inside the edge of his cloak, too, and looks at the dead couerl. His head turns, his left ear resting on his kneecap.

“You did not know who I was, when you rode into action.” He looks intrigued.

“No.” Of all people he might expect to meet here, Larsa Ferrinas Solidor was not one of them.

“But it was a great risk. You were injured. You could have been killed.” Now his gaze seems fixed on the claws, the beast’s still-open mouth. The crystal casts only enough light to make the cat a ghastly shadow.

Gabranth is silent for a moment. He could have been. The thought feels nearly like an opportunity he’s missed, but if he had died here, Larsa probably wouldn’t have made it back to the city alive, were he even inclined to go back. But that is nothing to say before the prince. The truth is that he never thought about that part of it. There was danger, certainly, but there wasn’t a question of riding past. He looks up at the stars again, chances a look at the horizon. There’s a faint pale smudge there, a wisp of cloud, certainly, but he’ll tell himself it’s snowcap, that for one heartbeat, it’s possible to see that far. “We— _I_ was raised to act when there was need.” There is no we.

Larsa lifts his head a little. “I am grateful.” If he catches the slip, and surely he does, he makes no comment. He shivers a little, and Gabranth notes now the thin indoor clothes he wears under the cloak that was obviously not made to fit him. He wonders if it belonged to Vayne at one point. No, he will not think on Vayne now.

“Milord, you will be missed.” And then the whole of the judiciary will bubble from the palace complex to comb the streets, the Old City, Sochen, the Highlands.

“Not until morning,” he says, and he yawns, settles in against his own knees.

“It will be close enough to that when we return.” In the darkness, they’ll need to go carefully. He stands and puts his hand down to help Larsa up. It isn’t until Larsa has taken it and is peering at the dead couerl again that Gabranth realizes how casual the gesture. He nearly apologizes, but Larsa is staring up at Tristan and Tristan tugs a little on the boy’s cloak ties,clicks his beak at him.

There’s no way Larsa will get his foot into the stirrup, and Gabranth bends, cups his hands to give Larsa a leg up. He looks dwarfed on Tristan’s back, but he sits at the right place, well front on the saddle so Gabranth has room.

“We’ll not be too heavy?” Larsa pets at Tristan’s neck, and the bird makes a contented sound. “Certainly you weigh more than my brother.”

Gabranth secures the other chocobo’s lead to the back of Tristan’s saddle. She doesn’t seem pleased, but she blinks sleepily in the crystal’s light. “Home soon, lovely,” he says, and he touches his forehead to her beak. He wants to ignore the mention of Vayne entirely, but Larsa spoke a question. “You’re considerate of the bird. That’s good. They’ll trust you more for it.” He swings himself into the saddle. “But for certain you weigh less than my armor. Tristan is sturdily built.”

“I see,” the prince says, and then he yawns. When Gabranth urges Tristan forward—a walk’s pace only—Larsa holds the crystal high, to light the way.

Gabranth closes his hand around it. “No need for that, milord.”

Larsa puts it back into his pouch, and the darkness folds around them. “But how will we see? It’s black as pitch.”

Gabranth halts Tristan. Yes, it is dark, and his eyes remember the crystal’s light, are looking for it. “A moment,” he says, for the eyes will adjust, and there, there the shapes of rocks come forward, soft gray, and there the dark outline of a small tree. The stars glitter above them, across the whole sky. In the desert, the sand must glow nearly white, like snow. There had been too many lights at Nalbina for him to know it firsthand. Gabranth closes his eyes to it all, lets his lids shroud everything, but they do nothing to still his memory.

“Oh,” Larsa says, and he pushes himself higher, looks all around. A wyrdhare shrieks in the distance, something’s meal, and Gabranth opens his eyes again. Larsa startles, but when he speaks, he’s calm. “The night is not so dark as it had seemed before.” When Tristan steps forward again, the boy reaches out, pulls a handful of seedheads from wild uplands wheat. He lets the kernels fall from his palm, fascinated. “You shall have to bring me here again,” he says, and his grin is a pale white curve.

Gabranth guides Tristan toward the city, away from where the star-stag’s antlers point. He lets the cold air fill his lungs, rolls his shoulders back. He should be chilled without his mangled cloak, still under the dead couerl, but he feels somehow lighter. “Whenever it pleases you, milord.”

“I will remember your promise,” he says, and he grins again. Gabranth has not seen anyone smile so freely in months. Larsa leans against him, and in time, his head falls forward in sleep. Gabranth wraps his arm around the boy’s middle to hold him in the saddle, tucks the over-large cloak closer about him.

“Remind me,” he says, though he knows Larsa does not hear, as the faint glow of Archades appears on the horizon. Far to the east, the dawn is a thin gray band. _Remind me_. It will be something to keep him here.


End file.
